While being in Buffalo NY, we visited the Innishfree Ceili Dancers during their weekly class on Tuesday in the Buffalo Irish Center. This was a big surprise for Donna Shine, who earlier that day had been browsing my website while searching the internet for Irish dancing material since she had to replace the regular dancing teachers who were visiting Ireland. She had been looking to the mainy pictures, and was flabbergasted to find me that very evening in front of her.
It turned out to be a pleasant evening, not just for the dancing, but primarily because of the very friendly dancers that didn't mind at all to have a stranger in their midst.

We started with two ceili dances: the Walls of Limerick and the Siege of Ennis.

The Walls of Limerick was danced slightly differently than what I was used to: in the swing figure, couples turned only clockwise around themselves, mostly on the spot, and not around each other. A second difference had more to do with the basic side step, more precisely when moving to the side of which the leg is in back position. Whereas I tend to do a jumpover to bring the appropriate leg in front, they "swing" the opposite leg back in a small circular movement.

The Siege of Ennis was danced the traditional way in lines of two couples, with the same side-step alternative as for the Walls of Limerick.

The set dancing part started with the Ballyvourney Jig Set. We didn't remember to have danced it before, but in fact we did once during the set dancing ceili with Jim Keenan in Leuven, Feb 2004, but that was without prior tutoring. This time, we could grasp the slide and change movement with the jig-step: 1) move in waltz hold forward to the corner left of the opposite couple with L-step R-step L-step R-kick (opposite for women) for 2 bars, 2) turn 180° backwards and clockwise on the spot for 2 bars with // R-back / L-down // R-step - L-2 / R-3 //, 3) half house back to place for 4 bars.

Finally, we danced the Plain Set as we had learned it before.

We wanted to finish that evening with a nice picture, but we found ourselves with three sets of empty batteries. Luckily one other dancer had a camera, and she promissed to send me the photo.